AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

'The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.

'But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...' (From the publisher's website.)

Notes

Dedication: To Reenie, For all these years.

Other formats: Also braille; sound recording, including MP3 by ABC and Bolinda publishing; large print

Changes in Tone, Setting, and Publisher : Indigenous Literatures of Australia and New Zealand from the 1980s to TodayPer Henningsgaard,
2016single work criticism — Appears in:
Transnational Literature,Mayvol.
8no.
22016;Abstract'This article examines four novels written since 1980 by two Aboriginal Australian authors and two Maori authors. Two of the four novels were written near the beginning of this period and feature settings that are contemporary with their publication; The Day of the Dog by Aboriginal Australian author Archie Weller was published in 1981, while Once Were Warriors by Maori author Alan Duff was published in 1990. The other two novels (That Deadman Dance by Aboriginal Australian author Kim Scott and The Trowenna Sea by Maori author Witi Ihimaera) are works of historical fiction written in the last decade.' (Introduction)

'Although Australian indigenous poetry is often overtly polemical and politically committed, any reading which analyzes it as mere propaganda is too narrow to do it justice. By presenting the verse of Alf Taylor collected in Singer Songwriter (1992) and Winds (1994) and discussing it in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the author, my essay aims to show the thematic richness of indigenous poetic expression. Indigenous poets have, on the one hand, undertaken the responsibility to strive for social and political equality and foster within their communities the very important concept that indigenous peoples can survive only as a community and a nation (McGuiness). On the other hand, they have produced powerful self-revelatory accounts of their own mental and emotional interior, which urges us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than that of social chroniclers and rebels.' (Publication abstract)

Dissident Laughter : Historiographic Metafiction as Parodic Intervention in Benang and That Deadman DanceA. Frances Johnson,
2015single work criticism — Appears in:
TEXT : Special Issue Website Series,October
no.
332015;Abstract'Benang: From the Heart and That Deadman Dance are both seminal examples of postcolonial historical novels by Kim Scott that consider ‘how much speaking’ and ‘what sort of speaking’ can occur in relation to portrayals of Indigenous subjects and traumatic histories of dispossession. Both Scott’s novels differently recruit a range of parodic narrative techniques to critique the monologistic language of colonialism. This essay examines how Scott recruits historiographic metafiction in Benang: From the Heart and That Deadman Dance to generate new metaphors of colonial power relations within the novel as heteroglossic text.' (Publication abstract)

Scenes of Reading : Australia-Canada-AustraliaSneja Gunew,
2015single work criticism — Appears in:
JASAL,vol.
15no.
32015;Abstract'I found the idea of a ‘scene of writing’ very generative and tried to retrieve a few mises en scène in relation to my own obsessions over the past 45 years of teaching both in Australia and Canada. Reading some of the publications coming out of Robert Dixon’s project (e.g. Dixon and Rooney) I speculated about how fascinating it would be to track Australian scenes of reading in relation to those writers who came to Australian literary texts with knowledge of languages other than English and with cultural contexts other than Anglo-Celtic ones. After the panel session I launched a kind of Festschrift for a writer who has embodied all this for forty years: Antigone Kefala. The book captures many scenes of reading her work in numerous languages and places across the world (Karalis and Nikas). I also started speculating about the recent work by Kim Scott and many others who have been working to salvage Aboriginal languages and that here too there is an important intervention into a prevailing mono-lingualism that still seems to be the default position in Australia. Paradoxically, the work of indigenous writers and critics may make it easier to argue for more attention to be paid to that intra-cosmopolitanism multilingualism comprising the many writers and artists who have always worked within Australia—sometimes in English or an English inflected differently as well as many many other languages (Chow).' (Author's introduction)

Suggests that Kim Scott’s novel, That Deadman Dance, is a work deeply preoccupied with its position as a fiction and with its relation to history, to the point that it becomes a central focus of the narrative.

Respecting Protocols for Representing Aboriginal CulturesJared Thomas,
2014single work criticism — Appears in:
JASAL,vol.
14no.
32014;Abstract'This essay undertakes a detailed discussion of how respecting protocols for representing Indigenous cultures supports the interests of Indigenous communities and producers of stories with Indigenous content. To highlight the importance of Indigenous protocols I review the prominence and reception of Aboriginal stories in Australian film and literature and discuss how protocol guidelines can prevent problematic representations. I demonstrate how protocols influenced writing Calypso Summer (2014), a novel exploring issues relating to my cultural group, the Nukunu, to illustrate the challenges encountered and benefits gained from employing Indigenous representation protocols. ' (Author's introduction)

'In True Country, the narrator draws the reader close and says, “You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this.” (15) Although the narrator speaks of ‘(a) place like this’ as “a beautiful place (…). Call it our country, our country all ‘round here” (15), belonging, for the reader, for the characters in each of Scott’s novels, and for Scott himself, is more than settling into a physical environment, belonging is finding a place in the story.

'Mamang, Noongar Mambara Bakitj, Dwoort Baal Kaat, and Yira Boornak Nyininy are major achievements in Scott and The Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project’s process of returning, restoring and rejuvenating language and story within the Noongar community and for an ever-widening public. In their form, content and intent, the stories renegotiate ideas of place and placement, confronting personal, cultural and linguistic dislocations in Noongar lives as well as an ambivalent narrative landscape in which language and story are central to both a lingering colonialism and the process of decolonisation.' (Publication abstract)

'The words of two prominent West Australian authors are articulated through the language of dance in this evening of short contemporary works performed by the talented Aboriginal and non-Indigenous dancers of Ochre Contemporary Dance Company. Excerpts from the writings of authors Kim Scott (That Deadman Dance) and Stephen Scourfield (As the River Runs) will be presented through dance, followed by brief insights from the choreographers into the process in which they engaged to bring these words to life in the studio. ...' (Source: Ochre Contemporary Dance Theatre website)

Second Miles Franklin Award to Kim Scott2011single work column — Appears in:
Koori Mail,29 June
no.
5042011;(p. 4)Abstract'Aboriginal author Kim Scott has taken out Australia's most prestigious literary award - Miles Franklin - for the second time with That Deadman Dance.'